Citation

Levesque RJR. J. Soc. Iss. 2008; 64(4): 725-747.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.00586.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Legal systems struggle to keep pace with rapid technological advances and changing social conditions that provide adolescents with much wanted and unwanted information. We examine this struggle as we note prevailing tensions guiding the development of adolescents' rights. We find that the United States typically adopts an inculcative approach, an approach that generally treats adolescents as in need of control and indoctrination into the values of prior generations. We also find an emerging human rights approach that adopts a more liberative view, one that seeks to bestow adolescents with greater control over their own rights and aims to shape informational environments that allow adolescents to prepare for their own futures. The divergence leads us to explore why adolescent jurisprudence—an approach to law that begins with adolescents' realities and charts ways to develop laws consistent with those realities—would benefit from taking human rights orientations more seriously. We end by highlighting how liberative approaches are consistent with our understanding of adolescents' realities and how such approaches appropriately urge us to revisit our society's fundamental commitments to justice.